Waiting for location permission...

Broadcast and play with friends

Waiting for location permission...

This site uses Cookies for basic functionality for visitors who have accounts with us. Also, our trusted and reputable third party advertisers use cookies to determine which ads to serve.

We care a lot about your privacy and making sure that your experience on this site is a safe one, and in that effort we store as little information as possible. You can read more about that in our 2018 GDPR statement here.

Please accept our terms of use which can be found here. If you have any questions, or you do not agree and would like us to opt you out, please contact us using the contact form.

Kraul Foragers Discussion

3 weeks ago

Thanks for your comment Argy. Sorry it took so long to get back to you.

It's not a pure aggro deck, but it's quite rapid. Those Pelt Collectors are a real pain to try and deal with. Turn one Pelt Collector, turn two Glowspore Shaman means I can swing for two damage on turn two, then playing any of the three drops means I can swing for a further six on turn three. I can reliably deal lethal damage in five turns this way.

If that doesn't work, the game then transposes into a mid-range grind, as you pointed out, and this deck is good in that regard, too. The Midnight Reapers, Vraska, Golgari Queens and Izoni, Thousand-Eyed all provide excellent card advantage. The Find half of Find / Finality and Gruesome Menagerie also grant excellent value - two or three creatures returned for one card can generally overpower spot removal. Gruesome Menagerie in particular, when it goes off, can win games. Control's best response to this deck is a board wipe on turn four or five, and after that they're left tapped out and unable to counter Gruesome Menagerie, which just laughs at board wipes. Even if my opponent plays a board wipe afterwards, I'm still trading one card for one card, plus I get those juicy ETB triggers so even in that scenario I'm ahead. It's a brilliant card, the only question is how many.

When I got back into magic recently I decided I wasn't going to spend a lot of money. Vraska's Contempt is definitely out, for that reason. Though tbh, I'll play Status / Statue in that spot anyway, should I need removal - it's rare I need to gain life, and if I do, Kraul Foragers is perfect. Wait, it's not in my sideboard. Oops. Anyway, Status / Statue for the most part kills a larger range of stuff than Vraska's Contempt.

I'll stick with Kraul Harpooner for now, since as a creature it has synergy with the other cards in the deck, although I haven't even played it yet since I normally just trample over flyers with my Charnel Trolls without really needing to sideboard.

1 month ago

2 months ago

@TheSilverZephyr Thanks for your feedback! Sideboarding is tough, there are a lot of good cards; and unfortunately I'm not currently able to play this deck competitively so my input here is unsubstantiated- but I'll take a crack at it.

vs CONTROL

2 months ago

This seems sort of slow and isn't building to a big enough endgame in my opinion, I would expect a lot of GW tokens and Red burn and this deck probably doesn't line up well against those. Kraul Foragers or something similar and Moment of Craving seem important against red and Golden Demise/more Find / Finality would help against tokens, to the point of maindeck consideration if you can't beat them game 1 otherwise. 4 Assassin's Trophy is probably too many also when you have access to other removal that won't put your opponent ahead a turn in the early game. I think either leaning more into control or going more aggressive is really what you'll end up needing to choose. I really want something Golgari to be a great pick for this standard season but goodstuff midrange doesn't seem like the optimal way to do it when the opponent makes 20 elf knights and has History of Benalia on its 3rd chapter or plays 10 burn spells a turn with Runaway Steam-Kin in play. Again, purely opinion and maybe those decks don't rule the format, I'm expecting at least a ton of red at my LGS and both decks topped the first SCG so they're probably going to be pretty popular for a while. Good luck!

2 months ago

Hey, I think you're trying to do too much here. You should consider simplifying the entire deck. Consider only Golgari? You have a good start with Reaper and Vraska for an aristocrat strategy. I suggest expanding on building the deck around these two cards.

I suggest this because Golgari lets you play more black. More black gives you access to black creatures who have good ETB abilities: Dusk Legion Zealot, Plaguecrafter, Ravenous Chupacabra and Golgari Findbroker. These creatures give you value before you sac them with Vraska. Other than Knight of Autumn, white doesn't provide enough good value cards for an aristocrat strategy and Autumn alone is not enough reason to include white. Black gives you many more options than white.

Reaper is a big reason to play an aristocrat strategy, but you don't get to draw when you sac a token this makes cards like Emmara, Witness and Warleader lackluster with sacrifice. These cards are by no means bad cards, they're all good cards, but not with an aristocrat strategy.

Magic the Gathering, FNM is TM and copyright Wizards of the Coast, Inc, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This site is unaffiliated. Articles and comments are user-submitted and do not represent official endorsements of this site.